China needs India eliminate soldiers from contested border area

Beijings foreign ministry asserts India has been building up forces-out and repairing roads along its side of the border near Bhutan

China has demanded India immediately remove troops from the border amid an increasingly tense stand-off in the remote frontier region beside the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

The Chinese foreign ministry on Thursday told India had been building up troops and repairing roads along its side of the border next to the mountainous Indian country of Sikkim.

The stand-off ratchets up tension between the neighbours, who share a 2,175 mile( 3,500 km) frontier, large parts of which are disputed.

It has already been more than a month since the incident and India is still not only illegally remaining on Chinese territory, it also represents repairing roads in the rear, stocking up furnishes, massing a great number of armed personnels, said a foreign ministry statement from Beijing.

This is certainly not for peace.

Early in June, in agreement with the Chinese interpreting of events, Indian guards crossed into Chinas Donglang region and obstructed work on a road on the plateau.

The two sides troops then tackled one another close to a valley controlled under China that divides India from its close ally, Bhutan, and devotes China access to the so-called Chickens Neck, a thin strip of land connecting India and its remote north-eastern regions.

India has said it advised China that construction of the road near their common border would have serious security implications.

The Indian “ministers “, Narendra Modi, is to visit China early in September for a summit of leaders from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Indian officials say about 300 soldiers from either side are facing one another about 150 meters( yards) apart on the plateau.

They have told Reuters that both sides envoys have quietly engaged to try to keep the stand-off from intensifying, and that Indias ambassador to Beijing is resulting the effort to find a way for both sides to back down without loss of face.

Chinese state media have warned India of a fate worse than the defeat it suffered in a brief border war in 1962. Chinas military has held live flame drills close to the disputed area, it said last month. On Friday the official China Daily said in an editorial that China was not in the mood for a fight , noting how the stand-off had been remarkably restrained.

However, if good manners do not work, in the end it may be necessary to rethink our approach. Sometimes a head-on blow may work better than hundreds of thousands of pleas in waking up a dreamer, the English-language paper added.